A time to merge?

This was published by the Boston Globe in the Sunday paper. The full article can be found online (see below). Many churches are facing shrinking congregations and making the decision to merge for long-term survival (or close their doors). The Roman Catholic Church has been aggressive in ensuring it's community survival but Protestant denominations tend to be more autonomous and accepting of short-term solutions. This article explores what is happening to New England churches. Thanks to Rev. Peter Mayer for the Facebook link.

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Here's the church, but where are the people?

Tiny Protestant parishes cling to life

By Michael Paulson

SOUTHBRIDGE - There was a time when the First United Methodist Church here was a hub of activity, with a booming school, regular church suppers, and worshipers who packed the pews of the white steepled building.

No more. The congregation has been dwindling for years and now is barely hanging on.

On a recent Sunday, just five worshipers gathered in the 300-seat church to pray at the 11 a.m. service. The Rev. Peggy Kieras sat alone by the grand wooden pulpit, cradling a remote control for the compact disc player that provides music for hymns, just underneath the towering pipes of the unused organ.

"I have a sliding scale number," she said, explaining how the size of the congregation governs how she presides during worship. "If it's over four, I preach from the pulpit. If it's less than four, I sit in a pew."

At a time when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and other Catholic dioceses around the nation have been closing parishes that attract as many as several hundred worshipers a week, Protestant denominations are supporting congregations a fraction of that size. Although both Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations face falling attendance at worship, these different branches of the Christian family are taking radically different approaches to determining whether a congregation is viable, and who should decide what to do about a failing church.

Catholic dioceses, with power strongly concentrated in the hands of bishops and a theology that says only priests can celebrate Mass, are citing declining numbers of worshipers, dollars, and clergy in moving aggressively to consolidate churches. The Archdiocese of Boston has closed nearly one-quarter of its parishes over the past decade. But Protestant denominations, which often emphasize congregational independence and democratic decision-making, are leaving many of their small churches open, avoiding the controversy that has characterized the Catholic process but allowing for a sizable number of struggling, even moribund, congregations with minimal programming and part-time clergy.

"We have some wonderful small congregations, but we also have some small congregations that are just really a bunch of folks hanging in there, sometimes with a lot of assets, and they're really not, to my mind, being a church the way they should be, but just clinging to the past," said Bishop Margaret G. Payne, who heads the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. "But in our denomination, the membership has to have a vote if they want to close, and they're usually reluctant to do that. And I have no need or desire to make my life more difficult by going around trying to close churches."

The number of small congregations is rising - the United Methodist Church, for example, now has 40 congregations in Massachusetts with fewer than 25 worshipers, up from 27 a decade ago, while the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Churches have some area congregations so small that they no longer meet at all. And the number of closings is also rising - the Episcopal Church, for example, merged three congregations in Fall River last month, and expects congregations in South Boston and Malden, among others, to decide to close soon.Continued...